Business Secrets from the Stars

by David Dvorkin

  BUSINESS SECRETS FROM THE STARS

  by

  David Dvorkin

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2010 by David Dvorkin

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  * * * * *

  Dedication:

  To Democracy

  You were the best.

  Visit David’s author page at Smashwords.

  * * * * *

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was on a lovely spring day in the Rockies, as I sat in meditation atop a fourteen-thousand-foot peak, that Lukas of Aldebaran first came into my mind and spoke to me soul to soul.

  — Business Secrets from the Stars

  Actually, Malcolm’s great idea came to him after lunch at a Mexican restaurant.

  The waitress was not as young and pretty as the fantasy Chicana on the cover of the menu, but she came close enough in Malcolm’s view and his present mood.

  Not that she seemed interested in Malcolm’s opinion. Although the restaurant was almost empty, she was distant and inattentive. She put the bill on the table, smiled mechanically, and asked, “Do you want anything else?”

  Malcolm and the friend he was having lunch with thought the same thing, but both said no.

  For a moment, Malcolm had the odd feeling that the waitress knew what he was thinking and was about to slap him. She looked at him coldly and turned her attention to another table. The two men watched her walk away and muttered to each other abbreviated versions of the something else they wished they had had the courage to ask for.

  Both men were approaching forty, both were divorced, and both were lonely. Neither had seen his life work out as he had once thought it would.

  Steve Golden, Malcolm’s companion, and a fellow Western Bell employee, scanned the bill, then threw down six dollars. “Wish it was five o’clock already,” he said.

  “Yeah. Wish it was five o’clock ten years from now, and I was free and successful.”

  “Well, if you’re wishing,” Steve pointed out, “why wish it was ten years from now? Why not wish it was now, and you were already free and successful?”

  “Right, right. After all, Shirley MacLaine says we make our own reality. God, what crap. I’ve been wishing for years, and reality still hasn’t changed.”

  They walked from the restaurant and down the street discussing the unfairness of Shirley MacLaine’s making vast amounts of money peddling New Age nonsense. The sky was cloudless, the sun was fierce, the Gypper was in the White House, and drunks littered the sidewalk. Malcolm and Steve were too engrossed in their conversation to think about the heat, and they stepped automatically around the splayed legs of the drunks. This area near downtown contained a lot of the sort of local color the Chamber of Commerce neglected to advertise.

  “She churns out that bilge,” Malcolm complained, “and the yahoos snap it up. While I write good, serious novels, and I can’t even sell the damned things. Life isn’t fair. But you already knew that.”

  “It’s not just her,” Steve said. “It would be bad enough if it was. But there’re others doing the same thing. The bookstores are full of the stuff, and those guys are giving workshops and charging people a fortune to attend.” He shook his head. “It just goes on and on. I guess we’re writing the wrong sort of stuff.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “It’s not just non-fiction,” Steve said. “Fiction, too. Angels. Indians. Hell, I don’t know, novels dictated by aliens. Maybe I should try writing under a pseudonym. Running Eagle Horsefeathers, or something.”

  “You’re part Indian?”

  “Everyone’s part Indian. Just about every American is part Indian and part black. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter, does it? You can just say you are. You can make up all the Indian stuff. No one knows what’s real and what isn’t. Or cares.”

  “You think that would work?”

  Steve sighed the sigh of the eternally defeated. “No.”

  After a while, Steve said, “Fakes. We’re a country of fakes. Style over substance. Mythology instead of history. P. T. Barnum was the quintessential American. There’s a sucker born every minute.”

  “But you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”

  “You don’t have to. You only have to fool a majority for long enough to get into office or become a zillionaire.”

  Malcolm had heard all this before. It was Steve’s one obsession. “Heavy, man.”

  “Yeah, damned heavy. This is a nation of people who live in cities and are descended from immigrants but think they’re cowboys and like to be told by television commercials that their grandparents live on a farm in Iowa. One of our most popular movie stars was a guy who couldn’t act, had never been a cowboy, had never been in uniform, but he played cowboys and war heroes, and everyone thought he really was a cowboy and soldier-warrior. One of his buddies, another bad actor who played the same kind of roles, is now our Figurehead in Chief. We have a guy in the White House who chuckles and drools and wears a cowboy hat for his publicity photos even though he never was a cowboy, and the public swallows it and loves him. He’s the lovable, braindead, cowboy grandpa they like to pretend they all had. Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus-shaped helium balloon.”

  “On the bright side,” Malcolm pointed out, “it’ll never get any worse than this. The Gypper is the nadir. We’ll never have a worse, fakier President than this. It’s got to get better from here.”

  “I suppose.” Steve was silent for a moment. Then he said, “The Big Gypper. The Deceptor in Chief. The Great Deluminator. The Supreme Mystifier.” Steve’s voice began to rise. “The Deceiver in Chief!”

  “Steve, Steve, calm down. I keep telling you, you’ve got to stop thinking about politics all the time. It only depresses you.”

  Golden laughed. “I suppose that instead I should think all the time about getting published, the way you do. Yeah, sure, that doesn’t depress you at all.”

  They walked on in silent, companionable gloom for a block or two. They had left the area where drunks littered the sidewalk and they were now entering the region littered by overdressed, rising young men and women. The two men had often debated which kind of litter was worse. At least the drunks were genuine. The yuppies were all playing grownup, whereas the drunks were just being drunks.

  This was a topic that often diverted Malcolm and Steve, but today they were both too depressed to bother with it.

  Both men had been writing stories and novels for years and making little progress.

  Steve had yet to sell anything.

  Malcolm had had two stories and three novels published. All were science fiction.

  One of the stories had appeared in a men’s magazine of so sleazy a nature, and bearing a cover which proclaimed that sleaziness so loudly, that he had never intentionally shown the magazine to anyone. Marlene had found it once and had burst into hysterical laughter, after which Malcolm had hidden the magazine.

  His novels had been, as his then-editor had kindly put it, “quietly received.” The first time he heard that phrase, Malcolm was pleased. He imagined his book being thoughtfully discussed in low tones in quiet, dignified surroundings. Eventually he came to understand that “quietly received” was a New York publishing euphemism for “totally ignored.” As Ma
lcolm was nowadays by New York editors.

  He fantasized about the editor who would say, “This is a work of genius, Mr. Erskine, sir! Where have you been all my life? How much money do you want?” The editor of his dreams!

  “How much money do you have?” Malcolm would reply.

  Malcolm could not understand why Steve had not yet sold anything. He liked what he had read of Steve’s work. It tended to be a bit heavy on political philosophizing, but it was well written. But then, neither could Malcolm understand why he had not sold more of his own work, or why what he had sold had been ignored by critics and readers.

  Failure made Malcolm despair.

  Despair made him whine.

  His whining had already driven away one wife and one agent and seemed on the verge of driving away a second agent. When pressed, he had to admit that it was difficult to say which loss was the more painful. Charlie, the first agent, had been ineffective but a nice guy. Marlene, the ex-wife, had been quite effective but not at all nice. She had, though, looked awfully good in underwear. Now the only human being Malcolm ever saw in nothing but underwear was himself, reflected in the bedroom mirror. The sight never excited him. As the years passed, he began to doubt that it would ever again excite anyone.

  “Yeah,” Malcolm said after a while. “Workshops. The yahoos are so gullible. Everyone’s gullible. It’s all about gullibility. Look at those workshops. Someone advertises a workshop that will tell you how to start a successful business or whatever, and all the idiots rush to sign up and pay a couple of thousand bucks for a few hours of empty talk and some glossy slides and a fancy binder full of illiterate nonsense. Workshops...”

  Maybe I could combine all of this crap, he thought. Use my fiction-writing background. Run a workshop while dressed as a gray space alien with big eyes. I could practically write the material in my sleep. How to start a successful business. Secret inside information from an alien.

  Suddenly he stopped walking and spoke aloud the title that had just sprung into his head: “Business Secrets from the Stars.”

  “Huh?”

  Malcolm looked around quickly to make sure no one else had heard him. “Er, nothing. Nothing important. Well, actually, I may have just hit on something. Wow.” The more he thought about it, the better it sounded.

  “You want to take the long way around, along the Mall?” Steve asked. “The girls in their summer dresses.”

  “What? Oh, no, not today. I’ve got to get back to the orifice. You’ll just have to be horny and frustrated on your own.”

  “Oh, I’m used to that.”

  Malcolm practically ran back to the office.

  With each step, it all became clearer.

  Tens of thousands of years ago, and vast numbers of light years away, a mighty business empire had existed. The Andromeda Corporation was its name, and one of its top executives was Lukas of Aldebaran, a member of a noble, admirable, handsome race known as the Merskeenians.

  Lukas of Aldebaran, star-dwelling Merskeenian! What a ring that had to it!

  The Merskeenians were the ancestors of mankind. Now, across the immense distances of time and space, Lukas was communicating mind-to-mind with the only human being of a moral, spiritual, and intellectual fiber sufficiently refined to receive his messages: Malcolm Erskine. Lukas wanted to pour into the mind of his descendant the secret business wisdom that had made the Andromeda Corporation so great and so revered. It was Malcolm’s duty to share this wisdom, these secrets, these business secrets from the stars, with his fellow human beings. Who in return would share their paychecks with Malcolm.

  Oh, this was dynamite!

  Of course, that first contact and all the astonishing revelations that followed it could not come to Malcolm in a cubicle or his apartment or out here on the street. The place had to match the experience.

  Malcolm pondered for a while as he raced back to his office. Finally he came up with the image of himself sitting in lonely contemplation in the solitude, the clean, pure air of a Rocky Mountain peak.

  That would be believable given that Malcolm lived in a city snuggled up against the Rocky Mountains and containing many enthusiastic mountain climbers and hikers among its citizens. Malcolm was not one of them. For him, the mountains were just an interesting backdrop, those jaggedy things off to the west that the sun set behind. Malcom preferred city life. If he sweated and strained, he wanted it to be because of a beautiful girl with shoulder-length black hair and not because of a mountainside. But he’d leave that out of the book.

  In the real world, Malcolm lived in a cubicle. He was a man-shaped rat surrounded by thin, movable four- and six-foot walls. He was required to sit in one place for hours on end, with his back to the cubicle opening, staring at his computer screen, churning out unspeakably boring computer programs for use by other cubicle rats trapped in the vast maze of the telephone company.

  Some of the cubicle rats liked to call themselves cubicle cowboys. They had convinced themselves that they were autonomous, in control of their lives, spending their days in a maze because it was their choice to do so and that it was moreover a strong and admirable choice. They were macho, they were manly, they were warriors in a great capitalist battle. Malcolm, excellent though he usually was at fooling himself, was immune to this particular delusion.

  The cubicle rats shared each other’s lives unwillingly. Malcolm knew more about his fellow rats’ personal relationships than he had any wish to. He had heard — could not shut out — their loudly angry or explicitly affectionate telephone conversations. He had always tried not to broadcast his own telephone arguments with Marlene, but she had a way of making him forget where he was and lose all self-control. “Oh, it’s you,” was usually the last thing he said at low volume.

  At his first job, after being shown his assigned cubicle, he had immediately decorated the walls with photos and a calendar, making it his space, converting it from anonymous gray to something welcoming. Using a hook rigged from a bent paperclip, he had hung a cheap plastic clock where he could watch it. The next morning, his second day on the job, he had arrived to find the pictures and calendars taken down and dumped in the trashcan and the clock on his desk, its face cracked. There was a note taped to his computer monitor reminding him that, as stated on page fourteen of the employees’ manual he had been given the previous day, only company-provided and approved material was to be placed on the walls of his cubicle. He had later decided that that was just as well, given how often he and his fellow rats were shifted from cubicle to cubicle.

  So he settled for the gray, supposedly sound-absorbing walls. He never looked at them, anyway. All day long, his attention was — or was supposed to be — focused on the screen of his computer.

  Malcolm’s desk was just a shelf attached to the cubicle walls, and the computer was placed so that its screen faced toward the cubicle opening. Sometimes, to give himself the illusion of privacy, Malcolm would swivel the monitor as much to one side as he could and would do his work with his upper body leaning awkwardly on the desk. That way, the screen wasn’t quite so visible to anyone walking by or sneaking up behind him.

  It was a good thing he had worked this method out. When he got back from his Mexican lunch, Malcolm swiveled the monitor to one side even more than usual, shoved aside a stack of already long-neglected requests for new programs, and began writing what was destined to become his first and only bestseller.

  * * * * *

  This, at any rate, was how Malcolm remembered the genesis of his great idea. He liked to think that his grand conception had come to him while he was digesting refried beans and a side order of menudo and that it had sprung from his existential headache like a New Age Athena. But the truth was that important seeds had been sown earlier.

  Five weeks earlier, in the case of the first seed.

  Malcolm had been ordered to attend a one-day workshop which was guaranteed to make him a more dynamic employee, a better salesman, and a more satisfied human being. His doubts about the util
ity of the whole thing were aroused as soon as he read the pamphlet which both announced the workshop and explained that no one was excused from going.

  “Attendance at the voluntary loyalty meetings is compulsory,” Malcolm muttered, quoting from one of his own novels.

  The compulsoriness of the workshop was enough by itself to excite his skepticism. In his experience, management always made compulsory those gatherings that no employee in his right mind would attend voluntarily.

  Although it was a depressing fact that a surprisingly large number of his fellow employees were enthusiastic volunteers at indoctrination events that he considered stunningly inane. What all of that might signify, Malcolm had no idea.

  More to the point, Malcolm’s job did not involve selling, so the workshop could scarcely make him a better salesman.

  Nor could any workshop make him satisfied. Only a best-selling book, followed by a cascade of dollars and sexual delights, could do that.

  And finally, he had no wish to become a more dynamic employee. He was happy being the narcoleptic employee he now was, and if he ever did achieve writing success, he would instantly become an ex-employee. He had already worked for the telephone company for ten years, and he didn’t see why any reasonably law-abiding citizen should have to serve a longer term than that.

  As if all of this were not enough, the pamphlet advertising the workshop was written in what Malcolm had come to call Corporate English, a subliterate variant of the language that filled him with helpless fury whenever he was forced to read it.

  Are you being all that you can be? All that you should be? When you lay in bed at night, do you sleep happily because you’re Career’s “right on track?” Or do you “toss and turn” because your worried about it’s path? Don’t worry any longer! Come join you’re Successful Coworkers for a 3 day Workshop where you will learn to “factor Success” into you’re Daily Life!